Wow, native English speaker and I didn't even get the pun until this comment. I thought it was a stupid play on "What app should we message each other on?" and thus kind of a silly name. But folks use it regardless.
I don't even have to open the link to know that it's that budweiser ad. That's where my mind goes too when I think about the name of the app.
I think whatsapp has a nice ring to it, even if people doesn't know how to write it. Surely being able to write it on a store search is important, but not as important as sounding good.
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And does people get the name of Waze? It took me a while, because in this case not being a native English speaker is a real problem.
Also a native English speaker, also had no idea it was supposed to be a pun until right now. I just thought it was another silly name from an Asian company.
Complete tangent, but, by any chance, when you read things, do you not 'hear' a voice in your head reading them?
Curious, because I'm pretty sure the first time I ran across Whatsapp it was in text, but I tend to 'hear' the things I read/write in my head, as though a voice read them to me. And because of that the pun stuck out. It might just be I'm more inclined to look for puns (playing games with them all the time with friends and family), but wondering if that might be part of it: if you just see the name and it's just a word, not something sounded out in your head, you of course would not notice the play on words.
Following on this train, as an fluent English speaker, millennial, Asian American that grew up in Texas public school all my life, and a lover of memes and puns...I also didn't realize WhatsApp was a pun...woah.
As a nonuser of WhatsApp, I don't care who owns it. Thinking the app comes from Asia is understandable; There's a large number of apps coming from Asia whose names sound nonsensical in the West (quite likely some of them have as much meaning as our own apps have, and are just foreign words or sounds). There's not many apps coming from Africa or South America these days (that I'm aware of), while Asia has quite a lot.
